Penni,
I don't have anything against fostering creativity, but the idea of having students write anything they want, and hoping they will figure it out somewhere down the line, seems pretty bizarre. I wonder why they can't get them simply to tell stories orally, if they want to get them creating without being restrained by the rules of grammar.
Storytelling is perhaps closer to musical performance than writing. I've known many very fine musicians that had no intellectual comprehension of music theory, though many of them, I suspect, had more visceral understanding than they would have cared to admit. When you're improvising, that's fine. When you try to write it down, everything changes.
I once heard it told (I don't know how truthfully) that a music student once recorded and transcribed a Benny Goodman clarinet solo, and showed the transcription to Goodman, who immediately declared that nobody could possibly play it.
Educational theories are strange things. My mother taught me to read when I was 2, which caused a bit of a stir in school, as I was doing Jules Verne in kindergarten. They bounced me out of first grade altogether (not much of a favor, as I was "the small kid" all through school). They were teaching reading using some theoretically brilliant new method. They dumped that method a little later when it became apparent that kids taught to read in that manner couldn't spell.
I still think the best way to teach good writing is to teach reading early, provide good, entertaining, books, and destroy all TV sets. It should also be noted that good writing is impossible without good thinking.
Steve |
